repo-standard/CHANGELOG.md

Changelog

All notable changes to this project are documented here. Format follows Keep a Changelog; versioning is Semantic Versioning.

[Unreleased]

Added

Two presentation checks, both from adversarially-verified research rather than taste — docs/presentation-research-2026-08-03.md records what the evidence supports and, more usefully, what it refuses to support.

• BADGE-COUNT (WARN) — more than five badges. Trockman et al., ICSE 2018 (n=294,941 npm packages) measured a non-linear relationship with popularity inflecting at five, motivated by surveyed maintainers calling over-badged READMEs cluttered and "trying too hard". WARN and never ERROR: the coefficient sits in an appendix without CI or p-value, so it carries "more is not better" and cannot carry a hard limit. Counting uses a narrower rule than the existing claim check — a screenshot or architecture diagram must not be counted as clutter. Measured: 8 of 18 open/ repos are past it.
• README-LANGUAGE (WARN) — the prose is not in the language this repo's readers were declared to speak, via a new locales axis in the register. English is the default; ms-ai-architect and okr are declared nb as Norway-only in audience. Detection is a stopword-frequency comparison over prose with code stripped, so a Norwegian flag name in a shell example cannot decide the document. Evenly bilingual prose is a SKIP — the question is live and unanswered. No running prose is an OK: nothing claims a language, and a thin README is checkFirstScreen's business. Measured: fires on exactly the two declared repos, silent on all sixteen English ones.

Deliberately not built, because the evidence does not reach: any rule about images, diagrams, screenshots or terminal recordings (every such claim was refuted 0-3); a README length bound (no evidence-based target exists); a section count (would fire on 9 of 18 — textbook "suspect the CHECK"); Mermaid source length and #gh-dark-mode-only (zero occurrences, and the instance's actual limit is not readable via the API, so any threshold would be a guess).

0.1.3 — 2026-08-03

Fixed

Three more measured false positives, all reported via coord the same day 0.1.2 shipped, from repos running the gate for the first time.

• extractChangelogTop truncated a PEP 440 pre-release (0.5.0a2) to 0.5.0, so VERSION-CHANGELOG disagreed with VERSION-TAG — which compares the untruncated tag and does not have this problem — over a version the manifest and the tag already agreed on. Reported by llm-ingestion-okf with a repro. An affected repo could reach 0 ERROR only by lying about its version; now the pre-release suffix is kept.
• BADGE-STATIC-CLAIM treated a bare status badge (status-alpha, status-experimental) as a run claim, the same as tests-34-passing. A self-declared maturity label asserts no run — the same class as version, licence and platform, already exempt. Reported by llm-ingestion-pipeline-security. build/ci/passing still catch the run-asserting compounds ("build status", "CI status"); only the bare word is dropped.
• BOILERPLATE flagged a bare FIXME even when it named the convention rather than an instance of it — a scanner's own docs describing what it detects ("Flag TODO/FIXME markers…", a table row listing "TODO/FIXME comments" as a finding type) read the same as a forgotten marker. Reported by config-audit, whose product literally is a marker scanner. "TODO/FIXME" named together is now read as the convention; a lone FIXME is still caught.

0.1.2 — 2026-08-03

Fixed

• checkInternalLinks compared a link's resolved target only against present — the set of tracked files — so a link to a directory ([x](dir/)) was reported LINK-INTERNAL-MISSING even when every file under that directory was tracked. A directory was never a member of that set to begin with. Reported by portfolio-optimiser-claude (coord 20260803T194933Z) with a minimal repro; confirmed and traced to the same defect in voyage, linkedin-studio and portfolio-optimiser — 12 of the 71 ERROR findings measured across the org on 2026-08-03 were this one check, not twelve separate repo problems. Fixed by deriving the set of directories that actually contain a tracked file from present itself, and letting a link that resolves to one of them pass.

0.1.1 — 2026-08-03

Documentation only. No behaviour change: scripts/ and register/ are unchanged from 0.1.0 — this release carries version strings and the correction below.

Fixed

• The 0.1.0 entry said the gate has eleven checks. It has twelve, which is what both the code and the README table already said. The entry is corrected in place, and this release exists so the catalog's pinned tag serves the corrected text instead of the wrong count. The count is drift of exactly the kind this plugin was built to catch, and it was sitting in the plugin's own repository.

0.1.0 — 2026-07-27

First release. Covers the checks that a single repository can answer on its own.

Added

• The gate (scripts/repo-standard-check.mjs) — pure classifiers with all I/O resolved into their input, findings tagged ERROR/WARN/SKIP/OK, exit 1 on ERROR. Twelve checks: README first screen, install block, install truth, required headings, files required by the repo's class and traits, open/<name> references, relative links, licence claim, badges, boilerplate, version consistency and description length.
• Taxonomy register (register/repos.json) — one central file mapping each repository to its class, plus the per-class file and install requirements. --refresh compares it against the live org listing.
• Three-outcome reference check — "matches no repository" (ERROR) is a separate finding from "matches something that is deliberately not a repository" (WARN). Sharing an outcome would let real dead links hide among correct text. Only names in URL position are treated as references; the .git suffix is normalised first.
• Two-axis findings — every ERROR/WARN carries a bucket alongside its level: broken (a stranger is blocked or misled), missing (an expected artefact is absent), weakening (present, but it reads as amateur). Output is grouped by bucket, because that is the order findings get acted on.
• Traits, a second axis beside class — class is structural and readable off the catalog; a trait is about what the code does. security attaches a SECURITY.md requirement and a ## Known limitations section.
• Required README headings per class — ## Install, ## Non-goals, ## Changelog. A heading present at the wrong depth is its own finding, not "missing".
• In-repo version consistency — manifest, README version badge, newest CHANGELOG entry and the git tag must agree. An untagged repo SKIPs the tag comparison rather than failing it.
• Badge honesty — a static badge asserting a test, build or coverage run is a claim dressed as evidence. Version, licence and platform badges assert no run and are fine.
• Install truth, not just install syntax — the marketplace URL in the install block must be the real one (offline, against the register), and the plugin must actually be pinned in the catalog (one call; SKIP if unreachable). A perfectly formed claude plugin install x@mkt fails silently when x was never pinned, and that is the single most disqualifying thing a repo can publish.
• Boilerplate, licence-claim and relative-link checks.
• The skill (skills/repo-standard/) — the judgement the script cannot encode: what a description should say, why the summary card must never be used to verify one, what not to retrofit, and where the per-repo boundary is.
• Link level follows the reader. A dead relative link in a root document — README, CHANGELOG, SECURITY — is an ERROR: it is in the shop window. The same link below the root is a WARN. Measured across seventeen repositories: 30 of 43 findings sat in shared/, docs/plan/ and .claude/ — session plans, agent working files, and path-traversal test fixtures whose targets are invalid on purpose. All 30 were ERRORs, which is how a gate gets switched off. Only the level moves; every finding is still reported with its file and line.
• The repo name comes from the remote, not the directory. catalog/ is the working directory of the repo named ktg-plugin-marketplace. Reading the basename left it REPO-UNREGISTERED with zero checks run — against the one repo every catalog rule depends on. The scp form the forge's clone button hands out is handled, and a bare host is not a repo name.
• 84 tests over the pure classifiers, using measured false positives as reference fixtures.

Notes

• Descriptions are measured in codepoints — not bytes, and not UTF-16 units. The same string measures 248 / 249 / 253 across those three yardsticks when it contains an astral character.
• enabledPlugins in settings.json is treated as a legitimate second install form. The gate requires a CLI command as well, and never reports the JSON form as the defect.
• Two network calls, both anonymous: the org listing and the catalog manifest. Per-repo fetching trips the forge's rate limiter, so neither is ever done per repository. --offline skips both, and the checks that needed them report SKIP rather than passing.
• CONTRIBUTING.md, CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md and MAINTAINERS.md are required by no class: the project is solo-maintained and publishes that stance. This is not a rule against having them — files already present are a cleanup decision, not a gate finding. SECURITY.md is unaffected; it exists for the outsider who finds a hole.
• There is no CI badge because there is no CI: the forge has no Actions runner registered. The substitute is one command from a clean clone, stated honestly. A badge asserting the test count would be the very anti-pattern the gate flags, and an earlier draft of this README carried exactly that.
• The link and boilerplate checks ignore fenced blocks and inline code spans. Documentation about regexes and placeholders is full of text that is a markdown link to a naive scanner — the first version produced about thirty findings against a real repository and every one was noise.
• Relative links resolve against the file they appear in, not the repo root.
• Indented text counts as a code block only when a blank line opens it, and then continues while the indent holds. The first rule alone made links inside nested list items invisible; the second alone let everything after a block's first line leak back in. Both were silent false passes, which is worse than noise — the second was caught by the gate on this plugin's own SKILL.md.
• A README H1 that differs from the repo name is a WARN, not an ERROR. The thread that has to hold is description == catalog == opening line, and the H1 is none of those three; a human title is a naming choice the operator owns. A missing H1 is still an ERROR.
• No hook ships in this release. A blocking gate has to be precise enough not to fail a correct repository first.